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how did we get here

March 10th, 2010

Sharism has launched, the NanoNote is widely available and the pieces for other copyleft hardware projects are coming together. It is time to take a step back, pause for a minute and look at the road behind us. Not to wonder, but to realise what we have accomplished and what we still want to achieve. This is the first of a serious of posts shedding light on the history and more importantly the vision of Sharism at Work.

Moving through the history of the different personalities in our team, there are countless anecdotes and dreams that played their part. However, there are three things that always come up: security, the drive for freedom and the wish for true innovation.

After having worked in various companies and projects ranging from simple web development to complex, embedded systems all of us realised the great danger for the user’s privacy and security. Do you know what all the chips in your all-you-ever-want phone do? Are you sure that only you can control all data on your devices? Sure, this sounds paranoid, but think about it. Recent developments, such as the “Telekom scandal” in Germany and the IPRED law in Sweden have shown that customer data is not private per se. Play with this scenario a bit longer and you will see that the step to using micro chips to gather information on the individual user is not that big and who can be sure that it hasn’t been taken already? So our answer is: know your device! Only once the user has knowledge of ever piece of technology in his/her hardware and can decide what should or shouldn’t happen, do we regain real privacy and are free again.

Running whatever you want, whenever you want it is of course a huge aspect in freedom. Who is to say that your piece of hardware can only be used for this one particular action? Or what if you wanted to adapt a device to fit your needs? Right now you have almost no chance of getting exactly what you want. There will always be trade offs. We want to create a culture where sharing hardware designs is as common as sharing software. Imagine development kits for handhelds, a beginners kit for mobiles or a book titled “How to build your own toaster”. Why would we not take the liberty to build exactly what ‘we’ want, not what ‘they’ give us? You do it every day already, when you mix and match the software you want, and need, on your computer. Of course hardware is more complex and we don’t want to reinvent everything over and over again.

Inventions and innovation have become so complex that they are almost out of reach for the simple person. Even huge companies struggle to get the basics every now and again. The vast spectrum of products that are almost alike, and yet have different qualities and different values of effectiveness, shows that due to modern culture we reinvent stuff all the time. Looking at new technologies as the prime example. Once a new product is released, the other players on the market try to offer the same or similar functionality, but they have to start all over again. Just think. 5 R&D centers trying to innovate will fight the same problems and the same hurdles to achieve a single goal. Wouldn’t it be just natural if they’d work together? Isn’t the very basis of human interaction collaboration? We are not advocating a single R&D effort but innovation on a whole new level, where knowledge and resources are combined to create true competition on quality rather than just simple features.

To be continued :)

NanoNote on Hackable:Devices

March 9th, 2010

The NanoNote is conquering Europe!

It is now also available from Hackable:Devices.

The price is 99€ plus shipping.

Qt on the Ben

February 26th, 2010

Long it has been said Qt would never run on the Ben NanoNote. Mirko now disproved those evil voices.

Check out his latest blog post.

Ben NanoNote hits EU online shops

February 16th, 2010

Tuxbrain announced the Ben NanoNote can now be ordered in their webshop

http://www.tuxbrain.com/en/content/本-ben-nanonote-available

first 3D game on the Ben

December 16th, 2009

Xianfu Liu about a 3D Game on the Ben NanoNote

http://www.openmobilefree.net/?p=367

game on Ben NanoNote

December 16th, 2009

Xiangfu Liu got a game running on the Ben NanoNote

http://www.openmobilefree.net/?p=359

GTK2 on the NanoNote

December 7th, 2009

Mirko Vogt ported GTK2 to OpenWrt and ran it on the Ben NanoNote

http://nanl.de/blog/2009/10/gtk2-running-on-top-of-directfb-on-openwrt/

videos from tuxbrain

December 7th, 2009

Tuxbrain uploaded their first videos of the Ben NanoNote

http://www.tuxbrain.com/content/doom-y-quake-en-ben-nanonote-videos

recent developments

October 17th, 2009

ben-directfb-gtkperf

Mashup – Sept. 23

September 23rd, 2009

Hey,

a lot of things have happened over the past few days. I wanted to touch on a view points here for those who are not subscribed to our mailinglist [1], yet .

First some small technicals, Mirko, together with the rest of the software team, reported progress in several areas:

[snip]
USB-Ethernet-Gadget is working.
You’re now able to speak ethernet, and therefore IP, to your Ben
Nanonote via USB.
That’s really cool, because now all the network-stuff can be used which
simplifies lots of things (e.g. SSH into the NanoNote, copying files,
etc.)

Lars found out the used NAND-chip is a multilevel-chip that has to be
treated by the flash-tools in a special way which should fix most of our
previous ECC-NAND-chip-problems.

OpenZIM, an opensource implementation for handling ZIM-files which
mainly provide wiki-articles (e.g. the wikipedia), it’s dependencies and
lynx as first webbrowser are ported to OpenWrt! This way the Ben
NanoNote can be used as offline wikipedia reader.
All of them need some more cleanups but will be committed soon.
Unfortunately the amount of RAM (32MB) of the Ben limits applications
like OpenZIM, so they’ll need some more tweaking to get them running
smoothly.

Thanks to Lars and Xiang Fu Sound (based on ALSA) and keyboard are now
supported, also work is going on to get the battery driver cleaned up /
improved (thanks to JieJing Zhang).

In addition there’s now a driver for the internally used real time clock
- also written by lars.

[/snip]

Wolfgang worked with Ingenic (the SoC manufacturer) and made amazing progress:

[snip]

good news for all Ingenic hackers: Ingenic agreed to install a little
rsync box behind their firewall that will rsync their ongoing Linux
and u-boot development svn repositories to our public server.
What that means is that any updates they do on the 2.6.24.3 or 2.6.27
Linux tree, as well as u-boot (old 1.1.6 version) and usbboot, will
become public the next day :-)

You can find the 4 new projects at http://projects.qi-hardware.com

ingenic-tools-usb-boot
ingenic-linux-01boot-u-boot-1-1-6
ingenic-linux-02os-linux-2-6-24-3
ingenic-linux-02os-linux-2-6-27

[/snip]

Atoms&Bits

Yesterday the first event (for me at least) in the Atoms&Bits Festival took place.

It was a reading of Cory Doctorow’s Makers. A very interesting meet-up of people from various parts of the Open Everything movement. The event will continue on Saturday for me. I will be around the event location, presenting the Ben NanoNote and the Qi philosophy. So if you have the chance, join us!

Design

We finalized the design of the device. Finally. Many tweaks here and there. Most importantly, the files are uploaded to our downloads directory[2] and of course are all released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license[3].

There is more news in the making and things will move quickly over the next few days, so stay tuned.

/mirko

[1] http://lists.qi-hardware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/developer

[2] http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/hardware/design/

[3] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/